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89% of Airline Carts Never Convert
Eighty-nine percent of airline shopping carts never reach payment — a worse rate than almost any other e-commerce category — and the fix may not be a redesign at all. Kameron Bertine, co-founder and CEO of Movmo, unpacks why airlines hemorrhage customers at checkout, how a ShopPay-style identity layer can sit on top of legacy PSS and NDC infrastructure without replacing it, and why he's deliberately sequencing a two-to-three year rollout before letting AI agents book on travelers' behalf.
Show Notes
Kameron Bertine is co-founder and CEO of Movmo, an identity and checkout startup for airlines and hotels founded in June 2024 and modeled explicitly on Shopify ShopPay, Stripe Link, and Klarna. Bertine came from a product design and ERP background and founded the company after a string of frustrating international booking experiences — re-entering the same data across multiple airlines, encountering bugs on payment pages, and discovering hidden baggage fees only at the airport. The conversation opens with the founding insight: watching his wife glide through a ShopPay flow made him realize travel needed the same persistent-identity habit loop. Movmo sits as an overlay on whatever PSS, GDS, or NDC infrastructure an airline already runs, preserving the merchant-of-record relationship that airline executives treat as non-negotiable, while giving travelers a recognisable one-click checkout experience. Bertine cites airline cart abandonment at roughly 89%, above e-commerce's 70–79% range, driven by session timeouts, repetitive data entry, buggy payment pages, and inconsistent flows across devices. ShopPay profiles convert around 50% better than guest checkout, and Movmo is betting the same gap will appear in airline booking once identity persists across sessions. Despite having the technical capability for fully agentic booking today, Movmo is deliberately staging a two-to-three year rollout — express checkout first, then white-label products — to build traveler trust before AI agents transact autonomously, noting that agentic booking currently ranks below 5% on airline executives' priority lists and that enterprise sales cycles routinely stretch 12 to 36 months.
Click to expand the full episode transcript (8,522 words approx.)
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About the Travel Tech Podcast
Hosted by Alex Brooker, founder of Airside Labs, the Travel Tech Podcast features authentic long-form conversations with leaders, innovators, and startup founders shaping the future of aviation and travel technology. No scripts, no sponsors, no sales pitches — just real conversations about building technology that matters.